The Sailor Part 68

John Milton or no John Milton, they almost had him out of bed again, when Mr. Paley came quite unexpectedly into the room.

"Mr. Pridmore, sir, has called. Shall I ask him up?"

Klond.y.k.e, however, had come up without waiting to be invited.

"Mary told me you were a bit below the weather," he said, "so I thought I'd come and see you. What's the matter?"

The Sailor could not answer the question. He could only gaze with wild eyes at his friend.

"You've been working too hard, I expect," said Klond.y.k.e, looking at him shrewdly. "Overdriving the buzz-box, my boy, with this new book that Ted Ambrose thinks is going to be great. You'll have to have rest and a change."

Klond.y.k.e perched on the edge of the bed, as if it had been Sailor's bunk in the half-deck of the _Margaret Carey_.

"Mary said you talked of going away for a bit, and she thought you might like me to come with you. Now what do you say to a little trip as far as Frisco, for the sake of old times? You can put me down there. I'm just beginning to feel, after a month here, that I shall be none the worse for another trek to Nowhere and back. And then you can come home by the next boat and finish your job, or go on a bit further round the coast, if you fancy it. What do you say, old friend?"

The Sailor, supine in his bed, was unable to say anything. But the trolls had no use for Klond.y.k.e. Hissing and snarling they had flown already to distant corners of the room.

"Shall we fix that? I'll go now to c.o.c.kspur Street and see if I can book a couple of saloon berths for tomorrow--there's a boat for Frisco most Wednesdays, and you are not up to roughing it at present.

Besides, there's no reason why you should. Now, Sailor, what do you say?"

In spite of all the trolls there were in the universe, Klond.y.k.e was still Klond.y.k.e, it seemed. Perhaps he alone could have conquered them.

"That fixes it," he said. "Just get your gear together. You won't want much. And mine's ready any time. I'll go along at once, and come back and report."

Two minutes later, Klond.y.k.e was away on his errand, only too happy at the prospect of being in harness again.

For the time being, the trolls were overthrown. The battle was not yet won, but a staunch friend had given the Sailor new fighting power. He was by no means his own man; he felt he never could be again; all the same, when Klond.y.k.e returned about an hour later with the news that he had been able to secure two berths for the following day, Henry Harper was dressed, he was bathed and shaved, he was clothed in his right mind more or less.

XIX

On the following night, the Sailor put once more to sea. But it was very different faring from any he had known before. A craft of this kind was another new world to him. Indeed, so little did it resemble the _Margaret Carey_, that it was hard to realize at first that he was once more ocean bound. Even the tang of salt in the air and the wash of the waves against the sides of the great s.h.i.+p were scarcely enough to a.s.sure him that he was again afloat.

It was the presence of Klond.y.k.e which really convinced him.

"I never thought we should come to this," said his friend as they lingered in boiled s.h.i.+rts over an excellent dinner and a band the second day out. "It's better than having to turn out on deck at eight bells with your oilskins soaked and the nose of the Horn in front of you. You think so, Sailor, I know."

Henry Harper confessed that he did.

"How you stuck it all those years, I can't think," said Klond.y.k.e. "How any chap sticks it who doesn't really take to the sea pa.s.ses me. But you were always a nailer for keeping on keeping on."

The case might be even as Klond.y.k.e said, but the Sailor had about reached his limit.

Klond.y.k.e himself, who was not a close observer, was struck by the change. He couldn't quite make him out. In his peculiar way, he had a great regard for the Sailor. He considered him to be a white man all through; and knowing so much of the facts of his life, he felt his grit was quite extraordinary. But now it had begun to seem that this gallant fighter was losing tenacity. There was something about him which suggested a boxer who has been knocked to the boards, who is trying to rise before he is counted out and sickly realizes that he can't.

What had happened? It was clear that he had had an awful facer. How had he come by it? Klond.y.k.e belonged to a type which strictly preferred its own business to that of anyone else, but it was impossible not to ask these questions, knowing as much of Henry Harper as he did.

Was Mary the cause? Had the blow been dealt by her? Somehow, he did not think that could be the case. And yet there was a doubt in his mind. He knew, at least, that Mary was fearfully upset. It was she who had come to him with a particular look in her eyes and had proposed a voyage for the Sailor on the plea that he had been working too hard.

That certainly did not suggest any unkindness on her part. All the same, he knew that his family strongly disapproved of her intimacy with Henry Harper.

Putting two and two together, he was half inclined to believe that the Sailor had proposed to Mary, and that against her own wish she had refused him. But even that hypothesis did not account for the morbid and rudderless state he was in now.

Nevertheless, the Sailor had still a little fight left in him. About the third or fourth day out, he had begun to make an effort to pull himself together, and then it became clear that the voyage was doing him good. In a week he was a new man. He was still deeply mysterious, he was not keen and alert as he used to be, but to the unsubtle mind of Klond.y.k.e that implied a case of overwork.

Indeed, as far as he was concerned, that must always be the primary fact in regard to the Sailor. How the chap must have sapped in the nine years since last they had put to sea. It was almost incredible that a man who had made a reputation with his pen, who in speech and bearing could pa.s.s muster anywhere, should have been picked out of the gutter unable to write his own name, and set aboard the _Margaret Carey_.

Yes, this chap had enormous fighting power. There was not one man in a million who could have overcome such a start as that. It would be a tragic pity if he went under just as he was coming into his own.

When they reached Frisco the Sailor was so much more himself that Klond.y.k.e, who at one time had been disinclined to leave him, felt that now he might do so without any fear for his safety. In every way he seemed very much better. He was brighter, less silent. There was still a mysterious something about him which he could not account for, but he felt the worst was past and that there was no reason why Henry Harper should not go home alone.

Therefore, when they came to Frisco, Klond.y.k.e carried out his plan of trekking to nowhere and back, where boiled s.h.i.+rts would cease to trouble him, and where, with a rifle and a few cartridges, and one or two odds and ends in a makes.h.i.+ft carry-all which had accompanied him to the uttermost places of the earth, he would really feel that he was alive. He invited the Sailor to come with him, yet he knew that such a mode of life was not for Henry Harper. And the Sailor knew that, too.

For one thing, he would be wasting precious time he could not afford to lose; again, now that fighting power was coming back to him, he must run his rede, must prepare to outface destiny.

Still, in taking leave of his friend, he was trying himself beyond his present strength.

The fact struck him with cruel force at the moment of parting on the waterfront at Frisco. Klond.y.k.e, wearing a fur cap the replica of one that would ever be the magic possession of Henry Harper, was on the point of going his way, and the Sailor had booked a return pa.s.sage to Liverpool. It came upon him as they said good-by that it was more than he could bear.

"You'll win out," were the last words spoken in the familiar way.

"You've not got so far along the course to be downed in the straight.

Keep on keeping on, and you'll get through."

That was their farewell. But as soon as the Sailor was alone, the awaiting trolls were on him. He was in better shape now than in those hours in Brinkworth Street, but the conflict was grim. Every ounce of will was needed.

He went aboard feeling dazed. Even yet he had not grasped the worst.

He did not know until the next day that England and Brinkworth Street were not yet possible, and that perhaps they never would be.

Therefore, when they touched at the port of Boston he changed s.h.i.+p and put about, having suddenly determined to make the grand tour as a saloon pa.s.senger.

He was well off for money. Popularity had come to him as well as technical success. He could afford to sail round the world first cla.s.s. And having reached this wise decision, he began in earnest to fight destiny.

He had made a pledge that he would not write to Mary, also, if his will endured, he would never see her again. It seemed the only course after that last failure.

John Milton was with him, also the Bible and Shakespeare and Shelton's "Don Quixote" and Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and a translation of Montaigne. Moreover, he had the Iliad and the Odyssey in English, also a Greek Lexicon. With the aid of this, he spent many an hour in quarrying painfully, but with a certain amount of success, in the original. This royal company did much to hold the trolls at bay. But in the evening they would hover round the lamp in the saloon; and during the night, when he awoke to the wash of the sea, expecting to hear eight bells struck and half wis.h.i.+ng he was dead in consequence, because he would have to tumble out of his bunk and ascend s.h.i.+vering to the deck of the _Margaret Carey_, then was a time for the foe. But with John Milton and a greater than John by his elbow, and with Aladdin's wonderful lamp still burning fitfully through the night, although of late the genie had apparently forgotten to trim it, the demons for all their hissing and snarling were never really able to fasten their fangs upon him as they had done that morning in Brinkworth Street.

Weeks went by. He saw strange sights and many familiar ones, he touched at some unknown and some half remembered ports, he watched the sun gild many majestic cities. Once again he saw on the starboard bow the trees of the Island of San Pedro. Once again he saw the sharks with their dead-white bellies and heard their continual plop-plop in the water. Once again he heard the Old Man come up the cabin stairs.

This time the heavens did not open, perhaps for the reason that there was no heaven to open for Henry Harper now.

About the third day out from Auckland on the homeward tack, he put forth a great effort to come to grips with "A Master Mariner," Book Three. But after a week of futile struggling he discovered that Aladdin's lamp was extinguished altogether.

The knowledge was bitter, but it must be accepted. Hope was the magic fuel with which the lamp was fed. If that priceless stuff should fail, the lamp could burn no more. Whatever he did now it seemed as clear as the glorious sun of the Antipodes that the mariner would never come into port.

Several times he changed s.h.i.+p. Mind and will steadily developed, but he was never captain of his soul. The demons of the past no longer besieged him, but Book Three was still becalmed. The hour was not yet in which he could return.

Months went by, but the future remained an abyss.

In the end, Ulysses came back to the sh.o.r.es of his native Ithaca for a prosaic but sufficient reason. It was merely that he was in need of money. After eleven months of wandering on the face of the waters, the liberal store he carried had almost disappeared. Quite suddenly one night, in the Mediterranean, he took the decision to return to London.